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Review: F1 Race Stars brings four-player karting to the living room: Racing game has cartoonish take on grown-up series

November 11, 2012

F1 Race Stars goes on location in Italy. Photo by Codemasters

If you've ever wanted to get your kids into Formula One, F1 Race Stars from Codemasters might just do the trick. Consider it a Mario Kart for the PlayStation set—except it uses real F1 drivers and cars instead of Nintendo characters and turtle shells.

F1 Race Stars—released today—sets drivers on caricature F1 tracks around the world. Four players can compete simultaneously at home, or players can go online to race against 11 other drivers from around the world. Both “fun” and “career” modes are offered, each with customizable rules.

Race Stars delivers the most fun when you have friends packed into a living room. During the race, players get power-ups, including ballistic balloons, speed boosts and warp drives. Attack a driver mercilessly and you'll become his nemesis. We couldn't tell if that changed anything, aside from the expletives being hurled around the room.

When playing for fun, rules can be changed to put more skill into the equation—by omitting the power-ups—or taking some out. Rules can also be changed to include just the wild power-ups. In that mode, only rain clouds, warps and bullet speed are available. Like Mario Kart, the big power-ups are usually reserved to help back-marking racers.

There are several damage modes to choose from when playing for fun, consisting of double, fragile, normal and off. Double increases the damage from thrown ballistics while fragile damages your car whenever you collide with another driver. Repairs can be made in the two pit lanes located on each course.

Three difficulty levels—more displacement equals more speed and more difficulty—range from 1,000 to 3,000 cc. Although, going through the career mode, we couldn't figure out if there was an extra incentive to win on the hardest level.

There are about 30 championship series with varying numbers of races to slog through. We finished about one-quarter of them on the easiest level during the first night of play.

On the downside, there didn't seem to be too many unlockables in the game, besides the availability of new championships. So far we haven't seen any new tracks pop up as we've won other trophies.

The game screen is also lacking a track map, which would help you navigate the sometimes-confusing tracks. On the other hand, that would make the many hidden shortcuts easier to see and find.

F1 Race Stars could be the most fun you have with your friends—or kids—this year. Ahem, especially if they are too young for that other big title that came out today.